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Reading!
I know I said I'd post about Anansi Boys, but actually I suck at book reviews, and this book is really, really hard to describe. Let's just say it's the story of how Anansi stole the stories from Tiger, and you should all go read it.
At the moment, I'm reading Samuel Shem's House of God (satirical novel on a medical internship in an American hospital, written in the late 70ies), and holy fuck, that book is cynical. Every word is true, though. This is exactly how modern medicine works.
This is exactly how it works. When I was working in the hospital, we didn't call them gomers (which, in this book, is an acronym for Get Out of My Emergency Room and is SUCH a fitting word), we called them pretzels. But it's the same thing, really. Pretzels don't die, and no matter what sort of medical care you give a pretzel, it always makes them worse, not better. All you can do is try to TURF them back to their nursing home. It sounds horrible, but that's how it works.
And this next excerpt House viewers might appreciate.
That'd be a good case for House, wouldn't it? Idiopathic drooping eyelids? I'd love to see what the show would make of that.
I love this book.
At the moment, I'm reading Samuel Shem's House of God (satirical novel on a medical internship in an American hospital, written in the late 70ies), and holy fuck, that book is cynical. Every word is true, though. This is exactly how modern medicine works.
The Fat Man1 gathered us around the electric gomer2 bed containing my patient, Mr. Rokitansky. Fats explained how the goal of the tern3 was to have as few patients as possible. This was opposite to the goal of the Privates, the Slurpers, and the House Administration. Since, according to LAW NUMBER ONE: GOMERS DON'T DIE, the gomers would not be leaving the tern's service by way of death, the tern had to find other ways to TURF them. The delivery of medical care consisted of a patient coming in and being TURFED out. It was the concept of the revolving door. The problem with the TURF was that the patients might BOUNCE, i.e., get TURFED back. For example, a gomer who was TURFED TO UROLOGY because he couldn't urinate past his swollen prostate might BOUNCE back to medicine after the urology intern with his filiform probes and flexible followers had managed to produce a total body septicema, requiring medical care.
1 The Fat Man: a resident.
2 Gomer: old senile patient.
3 tern: intern.
This is exactly how it works. When I was working in the hospital, we didn't call them gomers (which, in this book, is an acronym for Get Out of My Emergency Room and is SUCH a fitting word), we called them pretzels. But it's the same thing, really. Pretzels don't die, and no matter what sort of medical care you give a pretzel, it always makes them worse, not better. All you can do is try to TURF them back to their nursing home. It sounds horrible, but that's how it works.
And this next excerpt House viewers might appreciate.
Bolstered by pride, pretending I knew what I was doing, I waded through my first Clinic. [...] The next LOL in NAD1 was seventy-five, Jewish, and came in with her upper eyelids Scotch-taped to her forehead. Reading her old chart, I found out that this was a case of "drooping lids of unknown etiology" and that her previous Clinic tern had TURFED her to Ophthalmology, where the resident had told her to "tape them up or I operate" and she'd chosen the tape and had been TURFED back to Medicine. This was a BOUNCE.
"Oh, I love meeting all you nice young doctors," she said.
"How long have you had this tape on your lids?"
"Eight years. How much longer do I have to wear it?"
"What happens if you take it off?"
"My eyelids fall down."
I wrote her a prescription for more tape.
1 LOL in NAD: Little Old Lady in No Apparent Distress
That'd be a good case for House, wouldn't it? Idiopathic drooping eyelids? I'd love to see what the show would make of that.
I love this book.